Five people were killed and 38 injured when an SUV rammed through barricades in front of Tiananmen Square’s gate tower in Beijing and burst into flames on October 28, 2013. Amid tight censorship of social media and terse news reports, police launched a manhunt for eight people, mostly members of the Uygur ethnic community living in the restive Western region of Xinjiang. Within ten hours, police detained five members of the Uygur ethnic minority. Two days later, authorities declared the incident a “terrorist attack” prompting concern among Uygur exile groups over a backlash against the ethnic group.

A policeman of the Special Weapons and Tactics team stands guard on a main street next to Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Photo: Reuters

The country's security chief has blamed a Uygur militant group for Monday's suspected terrorist attack in Tiananmen Square and called on the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO) to help combat the threat.

Meng Jianzhu , head of the Communist Party's Central Politics and Law Commission and a member of the decision-making Politburo, said on the sidelines of an SCO meeting in Uzbekistan on Thursday that the fatal car crash was orchestrated by the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM).

The small separatist group, which Beijing has long implicated in terrorist activities in Xinjiang , has been listed by the UN as an al-Qaeda associate and designated by the United States for anti-terrorism sanctions.

State television reported online last night that all eight suspects came from Hotan in Xinjiang and had "canvassed the site three times" before launching the attack, citing the police.

It said the suspects, comprising three families and an individual, decided to set up a "terrorist group" in September and arrived in Beijing on October 7, hiding in Xicheng district.

Five of them returned to Urumqi five days before the remaining three on Monday crashed a Mercedes SUV in front of the Tiananmen gate tower, the CCTV English News channel said on its official weibo.

But the Japanese Asahi newspaper reported that family members of Husanjan Wuxur, one of the detained suspects, said he was innocent and had never been involved in terrorism.

Meng's remarks mark the first time Beijing has blamed a specific group for the attack, which struck at the symbolic heart of the capital little more than a week before a key party policy meeting.

"The violent terrorist incident in Beijing was an organised, premeditated act," Meng told Phoenix TV reporters. "The group that was behind it was the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, which is entrenched in central and western Asia."

Three Uygurs were inside the SUV that careened along a packed pedestrian walkway and struck dozens of people before bursting into flames, according to Beijing police and state media reports. Five more Uygurs have been detained by police.

Five people were killed in the incident - two tourists and the SUV's three occupants, who were from the same family. Forty pedestrians were injured.

Meng's claim was rejected by the World Uygur Congress (WUC), a Uygur exile group.

"China wants to generate favourable opinion with the international community and it wants to portray the WUC as a terrorist organisation and Uygurs as a terrorist ethnic group," said Ilham Mahmut, vice-president of the organisation. He questioned whether the ETIM existed.

No group has claimed responsibility for the incident.

Meng made his remarks at an anti-terrorism gathering of the SCO, founded in 2001 by China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

Li Wei , an anti-terrorism expert with the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, said the suspected attack in the capital appeared to be an attempt by the group to expand its influence.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as Beijing blames Uygur militant group for attack

There had been more than 140 immolation by Tibetans in the last couple of years which are their non-violent form of protest or resistance comparing to violent form of protest of the Uygurs. The underlying cause is similar: discrimination, political suppression, colonization through massive emigration of Hans, relentless exploitation of natural resources .... Instead of applying more force against such protests, violent or non-violent, the Party needs to face down to its "colonial" policy and practice against the ethnic minorities, Xinjiang and Tibet in particular. This is only the beginning as matters will surely get worse.

whymak Nov 3rd 20135:01am

sfore:
You're brainwashed beyond belief. Colonial? Did Beijing tax us? Did Beijing sell us opium? Did Beijing run our bureaucracy and pick a British constable with less than Form 5 education and pay him many times an ethnic Chinese professor? Who got those fancy residences on the Peak but British civil servants? Who got those housing and overseas allowances for their children's education and vacation travels to the British Isles? Who paid for the British garrison? Where did Hong Kong savings go if not to support the imploding British sterling at the Bank of England? Who got those HK government contracts without tender other than British firms?
Do we pay for the PLA garrisoned here? Do you see PLA MP's all over Wanchai bars on weekends hauling away drunken, brawling soldiers? Now who has this slave mentality?
Wake up from your bad dream and deprogram yourself. Maybe then you won't hate yourself so much.

scmpbeijing1 Nov 2nd 20137:25am

None of this makes sense. Where's the proof? ETIM probably doesn't exist anymore, and in any case, it was never big or powerful. Driving a car into a crowd of people, while beeping the horn to warn people, is not the work of sophisticated terrorists. China only hurts its own credibility when it makes charges such as this that it appears to be unable to substantiate.

Silly Beijing sycophant, the PLA are here to spy on us as they have been doing since they arrived. They are here to keep we non-communists under control. Get your head straight, boy. They are here to control us and our thoughts. Look at how the CE position has changed since handover. Look at how talk of suffrage has changed as Beijing has taken control. And even better. Look at the PLA offices in the Prince of Wales building. No one outside, and the building has been shrouded in scaffolding for almost 3 years. Gee, I wonder why. Down the street from the US Consulate and the British High Commission. Right next to Tamar. Down in the middle of central. What a great place to spy on each and every major operation in Hong Kong. Silly, silly wang.

Are you another illiterate? Explain the meaning of non sequitur as applied to my arguments.
Abusing English words such as democracy, human rights, including this one, are telltale signs of dim witted, brainwashed ideologues. You would receive an automatic F if you sat in one of my freshman courses with this factless, illogical and irrelevant argument.
BTW, may I ask if you had a good statistics course under your belt, or did you have a good college education?

gcmaster Nov 2nd 20134:15am

I hope the issue is resolved peacefuly.

sudo rm -f cy Nov 1st 20137:15pm

Independence to Tibet, East Turkestan, Inner Mongolia, and Hong Kong! (Taiwan is already independent in my opinion, they just have to act like it. Good thing the DPP looks set to win the next election whenever it is.)

ejmciii:
Facts are inconvenient. Hateful comments based on groundless conjectures are refuge for scoundrels.

whymak Nov 2nd 20137:33am

xiaoblueleaf:
Hateful people always rationalize terror on the innocents with ideology. Your indulgence in Schadenfreude 幸災樂禍 is quite typical.
I won't debate the widely quoted 122 Tibetan self immolations since February 2008. Except for the most dim-witted, the first question to ask is if this is a large number of suicides. Secondly, why immolation?
I don't have any official Tibetan suicide rate on hand. Suicide is a tragic human condition present in any country. In HK the rate is 14 per 100,000; in Japan 21.7.
To avoid comparing apples and oranges, I will pick a peaceful, "happy" Buddhist country Bhutan under no "Chinese repression and tyranny" as a comparative baseline for Tibet. Its rate is 16.2 and its culture is close to Tibet.
Given a native Tibetan population of 6.2 million, a good guesstimate of “natural” Tibetan suicides is a grand total of 5775 since Feb. 2008 without the dubious “China factor.”
What about 122 (2.1% of natural suicides) self immolations? Suicidal people are copycats just like the rest of us. For example, your China tyranny line is just another voice from the media echo chamber. Media publicity easily multiplies one self-immolation into many. Tibetan exiles also encourage children with suicidal intent to self immolate to further their cause.
Be honest. Is it malicious slander or stupidity that prompts you to write this note?

Great: You start with a string of non sequitur statistics and wrap it all up with an ad hominem attack. This is the kind of reasonable dialogue we've come to expect from apologists for Beijing's colonial ventures.